'They are trying to empower government': Ex-GOP lawmaker blows up 'irony' of the far-right
February 22, 2024
The evangelical movement that has so thoroughly overtaken the Republican Party has a philosophy that spits in the face of everything the party was meant to stand for about the role of government in private life, former Rep. David Jolly (R-FL) told MSNBC's Joy Reid on Thursday.
This comes after Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, who helped architect the state's controversial ruling that frozen embryos are children and jeopardized access to in vitro fertilization care throughout the state, was revealed to have expressed support for the so-called "Seven Mountains Mandate" in conversation with a Christian nationalist activist.
"I want to read to you what the Seven Mountains Mandate is," said Reid. "There's nothing wrong with believing in Christianity — this is a manifesto for evangelical Christians to conquer what proponents see as the seven key facets of life: education, religion, family, business, government, entertainment, and media. They could sure do that if they had complete power over the government, couldn't they?"
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"They could, Joy," agreed Jolly. "This is where the irony and hypocrisy is really so rich. You know, in terms of rolling back the history of progressivism over the last 150 years — at its core, progressivism has been about advancing human liberty and individual rights and individual freedom. That includes the basic freedoms that are already in the Constitution, from speech to religion to assembly and so forth."
"So the irony and hypocrisy of this theocratic movement within the Republican Party is this," Jolly continued. "At its core, they are actually trying to empower government. Not empower a free church and faith-based institutions. Not empower evangelical America and the synagogues and the mosques to practice and celebrate their religious tenets. They're actually trying to empower the construct of the state, which if you ask any conservative or Republican they would say, no, no, that's not what we're doing. That's exactly what they're doing. They're trying to empower the state to control the lives of individuals including on the basic teachings of religious tenets."
"One of the disconnects I had with the Republican movement all along, whether it be marriage equality or questions of reproductive freedom or get to some hard questions of cultural equity and race, the role of the state is to create equity," he added. "And the result of that is an empowered church. And so this entire conservative movement could celebrate the church today and say we don't need the government. All we need is the government to level the playing field. They're trying to use the government as a tool of religion. It's not only hypocrisy and wrong, but it's very dangerous and it's a theocratic movement now in the party."
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